The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - October 18, 2022


165 The Case Against the Sexual Revolution ｜ Louise Perry


Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 2 minutes

Words per minute

186.45

Word count

11,683

Sentence count

63


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 The argument is that marriage is an oppressive tool, which I say, yes, it is.
00:00:06.120 When motherhood became a biological choice for women, fatherhood became a social choice for men.
00:00:10.360 It became socially acceptable for men to walk away from children in a way that it hadn't been before.
00:00:15.500 Those high status men are able to really, really set the terms.
00:00:18.460 If a woman doesn't, say, have sex on the first date, it's easy enough to find another woman who will.
00:00:23.320 So you end up with a slightly artificial level of competition between women who, you know,
00:00:26.880 there are actually enough men to go around but there aren't enough men that they actually want
00:00:30.120 to be with to go around and so they're competing for a minority of men who basically have I mean
00:00:35.500 it's kind of open season they can demand that their own preferences be met
00:00:38.660 Louise Perry it's very nice to meet you and you what a pleasure to be here yeah this should be
00:00:52.900 good thank you very much for agreeing to come on I'm excited for this conversation before we get
00:00:58.280 started can you give a brief background about who you are and what did you do I am a British
00:01:03.640 journalist based in London and a campaigner and I the director of a think tank called the other
00:01:09.780 half which maybe we're going to talk about which is um we promote what we call common sense feminism
00:01:14.380 wow yeah and uh and I'm an author of a new book called the case against sexual revolution case
00:01:20.960 against the sexual revolution okay this should be good how much negativity do you get online
00:01:26.180 less than you'd think good i thought yeah i thought that i'd get loads but actually i would
00:01:31.720 say 90 positive well you have a very nice soft voice too maybe that's what it is yeah people
00:01:37.940 can't get mad at you too mad at you oh that's nice i think it might be the english accent as
00:01:42.420 well yeah that's sneaky that's makes people sound smarter too it's kind of like a cheat code in life
00:01:48.500 oh yeah yeah yeah okay this should be good so what's your book what's your book about and what
00:01:54.480 is common sense feminism let's start with what is common sense feminism actually i mean partly
00:01:59.680 it's a nice phrase that sort of confuses people disoves calling a book something like the case
00:02:04.980 against the social revolution it's a bit it's a bit confounding isn't it what we're trying to do
00:02:08.980 with the other half the reason we called it the other half is because it's not only about talking
00:02:13.960 about women you know the other half of the human race it's also about talking about the other half
00:02:18.280 of life because my view that I put forward in the book is that what the feminist project has been
00:02:24.680 at least in the second half of the 20th century until now has been about encouraging women to be
00:02:30.620 more like men in every possible way so to imitate male sexuality to gain access to the male sphere
00:02:37.040 to imitate the male life cycle in terms of things like prioritizing professional success over
00:02:43.420 everything else all this sort of stuff and I think it is very clear and is becoming clearer over time
00:02:48.540 that this isn't making women happy and that actually most women do not see that as their
00:02:53.840 aspiration in life most women want to either prioritize family life or to or to balance it
00:03:00.340 against career most women want to spend more time with their children not less most women want to
00:03:06.580 aspire to stable and meaningful monogamous relationships rather than have sex like a man
00:03:13.920 as Sex and the City described it and this is extremely obvious from polling you ask
00:03:20.180 British women and indeed American women all of these questions and it's a fairly there's a fairly
00:03:24.720 resounding majority but that isn't what you hear represented in Westminster or indeed in Washington
00:03:29.440 because there's a really big gap between what most feminist lobbying organizations
00:03:33.520 rather because the organizations of all kinds and also in the media tend to represent as what women
00:03:39.980 want and what women do actually want so that the project that we've set ourselves is to try and
00:03:45.200 represent majority female opinion in the corridors of power wow okay are you making any progress
00:03:54.480 it's very early days but yes i would say yes good good um do you know the background of why
00:04:02.040 this sexual revolution kind of pushed women towards acting more like men it's an interesting
00:04:07.520 question i think it's probably partly got to do with the women who who forms the second wave
00:04:14.100 um i think that the the feminist culture of the 1970s um which was really focused in places like
00:04:24.520 greenwich village in new york and a handful of other urban centers and the women who who who
00:04:30.780 wrote the most important text of the second wave and went on to found organizations like now
00:04:34.780 tended to be super super well educated super intelligent super disagreeable particularly
00:04:42.720 disinclined towards things like family life you know the whole the whole from their point of view
00:04:49.060 they were really spurred on by a desire to reject the traditional feminine role and often did so in
00:04:53.360 quite spectacular ways you know on a personal level some of the biographies of second wave was
00:04:56.720 really um really unusual really interesting and so they obviously had preferences that are
00:05:03.820 different from average female preferences which isn't to say that everything that they can pay
00:05:08.700 for was kind of misaligned with what is good for most women you know things like setting up
00:05:14.140 domestic violence shelters or setting up rape crisis centers my first job working out of
00:05:18.360 university was um was working in a rape crisis center those are the kind of institutions
00:05:23.240 born from the second wave which are you know like really good I don't think anyone I think
00:05:30.240 very few even anti-feminists would argue against the establishment of those kind of institutions
00:05:34.400 but I think they were also just generally geared towards aspiring to a more masculine way of living
00:05:41.240 just on the basis of self-selection and personality than are most women that would be my guess as to
00:05:47.820 why the priorities kind of tended in that direction that's interesting that totally
00:05:53.020 makes sense too a bunch of disagreeable extremely smart women pushed society in a direction that
00:05:58.960 doesn't represent the average woman yeah yeah wow although i'd also say that i think that the
00:06:05.000 feminist thinking has been important and has and has um shaped our recent history in all sorts of
00:06:12.780 important ways but it it all comes secondary to material changes all of it you know the i think
00:06:20.580 it was phyllis lapley who first said that the washing machine did more to liberate women than
00:06:25.800 did feminist campaigning i think this is just so this is evidently true right and there are so
00:06:33.180 many ways in which our lives have dramatically changed within the last hundred years not just
00:06:36.960 the washing machine but the pill which has really formed the yeah the center of my my book the fact
00:06:42.320 that we now are orientated much more towards a knowledge
00:06:45.740 and service-based economy, which de-emphasizes manual work
00:06:50.500 and physical strength, which, of course, men have more of.
00:06:55.480 I think all of these things have pushed women out
00:07:02.240 of the domestic sphere and into more masculine roles.
00:07:07.540 you know it is good for GDP to put it bluntly to to have women participating in the workforce and
00:07:14.420 when you have things like washing machines and central heating and microwaves and all these
00:07:19.580 things which mean that the work of running a household just takes less time it becomes more
00:07:24.420 possible to for women to do things like that and when you can also delay childbearing through the
00:07:28.360 pill and other contraception women being more like men becomes possible and becomes actually
00:07:33.640 economically productive the problem is that there are all sorts of costs down the line from that
00:07:38.480 and actually including economic costs down the line from that which mean that we're dealing with
00:07:43.060 some quite painful trade-offs this episode is sponsored by nordvpn if you followed the show
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00:09:14.660 episode okay wow well that i want to cover a bunch from what you just talked about uh let's
00:09:20.840 start with economic trade-offs so what are the economic trade-offs for having I suppose women in
00:09:25.300 the workplace and less around children because someone has to look after the children would be
00:09:30.300 the first thing so you have this slightly strange artifacts of the way that we measure GDP where if
00:09:37.680 you have if a if a mother goes to work and hires a nanny to do her role what was her role while
00:09:44.960 she's at work um that appears to be economic growth because you now have in that unit you
00:09:50.860 have mother father nanny all employed as opposed to just having father employed it's it's a
00:09:56.940 misleading way of calculating that though because there's you know the work of the domestic work
00:10:02.380 that was previously unpaid is still being done it's exactly the same work it's just being done
00:10:06.980 by someone else and for a wage um and of course is is there's all sorts of sort of friction in
00:10:14.020 that system that wouldn't be there otherwise because you've got three rotating parts that
00:10:18.180 need to lock together unlike in the single earner household where you just have the one and then you
00:10:22.280 have someone you have specialization between mother and father and you have mother specializing
00:10:26.600 in the domestic work um instead when you introduce the paid component everything becomes much more
00:10:32.160 complex much more liable for collapse so interestingly it was um elizabeth warren of
00:10:37.220 all people who wrote a book some decades ago ago called the two income trap about oh yeah yeah
00:10:43.480 yeah when you when when both parents are in paid employment the household becomes dependent on
00:10:50.480 both of them being in paid employment and there's much less room for slack whereas what you would
00:10:54.240 have had previously is is women kind of dipping in and out of the workforce particularly working
00:10:58.760 class women dipping in and out of the workforce when say children are a bit older or when others
00:11:04.140 earnings have suffered and they need a bit of extra money and female labor participation becomes
00:11:10.140 are sort of a variable that can change over time depending on economic circumstances whereas if
00:11:16.220 the family all families are dependent on two full-time incomes there's no room for slack
00:11:20.780 there's no there's no source of other income if if hard times come along and what's more you all
00:11:25.520 end up competing with so the lump of labour fallacy obviously you know it's not quite true
00:11:31.740 that um you end up with wages halved by women entering the workforce because women entering
00:11:36.660 the workforce does grow the economy in all sorts of ways but there are certain products like housing
00:11:41.060 for instance if you have a fixed supply of housing in say a good school district and everyone is
00:11:47.240 competing for to buy that to buy that housing and everyone is competing with two incomes rather than
00:11:53.160 one you you do end up in a situation which i think we we're in now where in order to have a good
00:11:59.140 standard of living you have to have two incomes unless you have one extraordinarily high high
00:12:04.460 earner so is that is that a result of women going back to work or going to work in the first place
00:12:11.240 is that actually a direct result of that or did the housing in the increase in housing prices come
00:12:16.340 first there are other things contributing to housing housing prices um including i mean the
00:12:24.500 the the thing that is most often spoken about in the political discourse on this is lack of building
00:12:29.540 which clearly is a factor it's a fact as well in somewhere like the uk that you have this
00:12:33.700 extreme concentration of high-earning jobs in london and in other in other parts of the world
00:12:39.060 you have this concentration of high-earning jobs in in in the major cities so you will expect you
00:12:43.580 know house prices in san francisco to rocket because silicon valley is based nearby um there
00:12:49.000 are other factors but i think it is absolutely the case that joint mortgages the fact that you
00:12:54.480 now have have two incomes competing for the same for the same product with housing that everyone
00:13:00.920 wants has made it more difficult for people to live on single incomes and look there are advantages
00:13:05.420 of women being in the way i mean i say this look at me i'm working there are advantages of women
00:13:09.840 being in the workforce in all sorts of ways um women having you know we mentioned domestic
00:13:14.980 violence briefly that if women have separate sources of of income and want to escape an
00:13:19.600 abusive marriage that's clearly advantageous the fact that women i mean women on average are as
00:13:24.000 intelligent as men have all sorts of skills that are actually really well suited to modern economy
00:13:29.160 the fact that women are more agreeable than men is actually great in a service economy for instance
00:13:35.160 and increasingly I'd say that office culture and all sorts of corporate culture is increasingly
00:13:40.780 feminine and and actually women can really really flourish in that kind of environment so
00:13:46.400 I think that the the the idea that we can just sweep women out of public life and go back to
00:13:54.080 the 1950s which is of course an unusual decade um i don't think that's going to happen even if we
00:13:59.420 wanted it to but but but the but these trade-offs exist as with as with any complex historical change
00:14:05.140 interesting okay um you you spoke about the birth control pill i'm very interested in that i i know
00:14:15.080 when i was young i was put on the birth control when i was 14 i think for my skin you know because
00:14:20.820 you get and yeah i i didn't stop taking until i was 23 when i started reading about what the birth
00:14:27.660 control does to your brain and the side effects it can cause and generally does cause that's what
00:14:33.480 i've figured out since right like depression things like that uh can you get into what what
00:14:39.580 you think the birth control has done to society it's interesting you talk about that i mean i
00:14:44.880 don't really write in the book about the past the personal side effects of birth control pill but
00:14:49.100 so many women experience it and just and just anecdotally i know so many women who've said they
00:14:53.960 came off the pill and their personalities completely changed yeah and they realize how
00:14:58.200 because as you say if you go on it as a teenager for acne and then you're still on it for decades
00:15:02.700 you don't even know you don't even know also if you're having a moody teenage phase then and the
00:15:08.900 moodiness never ends then you don't identify the issues as the pill it's extremely problematic yeah
00:15:15.120 especially if you've been taking it for so long you don't even notice it's like a vitamin
00:15:18.320 then yeah and it shouldn't surprise us really because we're meddling with very very important
00:15:23.900 hormones um which have all sorts of overarching effects that we show we don't really understand
00:15:28.800 I mean we don't as a as a species we don't really understand our reproductive system at all
00:15:33.380 yeah um and all of the efforts to do things like growing babies outside of the womb or sex change
00:15:39.640 or you know any of these sort of ambitious scientific projects they're going nowhere
00:15:43.020 like let's be real yeah it's so much more complex than anyone can actually grasp i think we're
00:15:49.100 a long way away from being able to do that kind of radical radical transformation even if we'd
00:15:54.040 want to i think the idea of growing i personally find it incredibly dystopian the idea of growing
00:15:57.860 babies outside of the human body oh and you have it's so narcissistic too it's like oh well we're
00:16:03.360 smart enough to figure this out that's that's just a narcissistic way of thinking i think
00:16:07.500 imagine imagine a newborn who'd never heard his or her mother's heartbeat i just find that
00:16:12.060 oh astonishing yeah you with your like english accent too it's like worse that description's
00:16:18.100 worse yeah it's so sad yeah um so the pill yeah i mean so in terms of the social consequences of it
00:16:25.800 i don't think that we should be surprised that for the first time in the history of the world
00:16:29.920 reliably separating sex and reproduction has had some pretty massive effects and that those effects
00:16:35.400 have been uh both positive and negative and and vast right and the thing that you notice happening
00:16:43.060 across if you if you know you look at the the social effects in the decade or two immediately
00:16:47.980 following the introduction of the pill remembering that it came in two ways so initially the pill was
00:16:51.860 made available to married women only and then it was made available to unmarried women as well
00:16:56.560 and then not long afterwards you have i mean the the timeline in britain and america and other
00:17:03.040 western nations is all about the same not long afterwards you then get the decriminalization of
00:17:07.640 abortion and then not long afterwards you see the the shotgun marriage ends as an institution
00:17:14.160 you see you see marriage rates of all kind falling off a cliff but you also see the shotgun marriage
00:17:18.700 which had existed to deal with unwanted childbearing disappears as a social tool and the
00:17:26.940 really perverse outcome of the pill which is a beautiful example of the fact that human beings
00:17:32.260 are very, very complicated and our societies are very complicated. You can't predict how
00:17:35.940 technology shocks are going to affect them. You see rates of single motherhood rise. Who would
00:17:41.880 have thought that would happen, right? You introduce technology which allows women to
00:17:45.140 regulate their fertility and it leads to a rise in single motherhood. But I think the reason for
00:17:50.240 that is because the pill isn't 100% effective, no form of contraception is. And actually the early
00:17:55.460 pill in particular, you've got quite a high rate of, quite a high failure rate. But you end up with
00:18:01.160 the absolute amount of premarital sex goes up and therefore some portion of that is going to
00:18:07.880 result in an unwatered pregnancy and and some women for whatever reason don't want to have an
00:18:13.300 abortion and so you'll end up with unexpected babies and when the social institutions that
00:18:19.280 used to exist to regulate fertility like marriage have all fallen away as a result of the pills
00:18:25.960 introduction that's i mean the the phrase i use in the book which isn't original to me i can't
00:18:30.460 remember who first said it but when motherhood became a biological choice for women fatherhood
00:18:34.980 became a social choice for men and it became socially it became socially acceptable for men
00:18:39.760 to walk away from children in a way that it hadn't been before not to say that there hadn't always
00:18:46.180 been cases of scoundrels you know impregnating women and then and then leaving but it is now
00:18:52.420 the deadbeat dad is now completely socially acceptable in a way that he wasn't before
00:18:56.960 and is really, in a way, one of the winners of the sexual revolution
00:19:01.100 because there's now no...
00:19:03.660 I mean, the rates of non-payment of child support are astonishingly high.
00:19:07.520 And it shouldn't surprise us that single mothers are some of the...
00:19:11.720 It's the group of people most likely to be in poverty,
00:19:14.300 while married mothers are least likely to be,
00:19:17.520 which is why I have a chapter at the end of my book
00:19:19.140 where I make a feminist case for marriage
00:19:20.580 and say that actually marriage is completely in the interest of mothers and of children.
00:19:26.960 That doesn't surprise me at all.
00:19:28.520 But that has probably been the most controversial chapter
00:19:31.140 from feminist readers.
00:19:32.240 Really?
00:19:33.120 Yeah.
00:19:33.640 Well, yeah, I suppose.
00:19:35.840 If you don't think about it, then it would be difficult
00:19:38.640 to wrap your head around, I suppose.
00:19:40.820 The argument is that marriage is an oppressive tool,
00:19:44.440 which I say, yes, it is.
00:19:49.000 Or maybe repressive would be a better way of phrasing it
00:19:52.300 in that the whole point of it as an institution
00:19:54.460 is that you make a promise and you're obliged to keep your promise and that means that your
00:20:00.040 freedom is limited there are things that you can't do anymore once you've entered into that
00:20:03.840 kind of institution but that applies just as much to men as it does to women the purpose of the
00:20:09.540 institution is that it is controlling but the principle being once you've established this
00:20:15.120 unit legally bound together socially bound together spiritually bound together if you
00:20:19.140 if you understand in a religious sense then that is the basis from which you can form family
00:20:23.180 So it's a kind of, it is, yes, it's a means of control and repression, but it's one that permits your life to begin as a family.
00:20:32.080 And means, you know, in extremis that the nature of sexual asymmetry, which despite all of recent efforts by the trans movement and so on, isn't going away, right?
00:20:42.520 Men and women are profoundly different on a cellular level.
00:20:45.540 I find it really interesting that the campaign to deny the existence of biological differences between men and women has arisen at exactly the same time and become perversely successful at exactly the same time that actually we're understanding more and more about how profoundly we do differ.
00:21:02.240 Ooh, let's get into that.
00:21:04.940 How do women and men differ?
00:21:07.400 You said on a cellular level.
00:21:09.180 Yeah.
00:21:09.640 So in the obvious ways, women are the ones who get pregnant.
00:21:12.960 Men are not.
00:21:13.580 we are smaller and weaker than men particularly on in terms of upper body strength so the the
00:21:19.160 force that a woman can apply through a punch is about half as much as a man um which is a lot
00:21:26.320 right and this is why you see in um in elite athletics the difference between male and female
00:21:32.720 athletes is is huge i do wonder whether the the people the progressives who are most in denial
00:21:41.340 about the differences between men and women physically i i cannot help but suspect that
00:21:46.540 they don't do a lot of sports because i think that if you participate particularly in strength
00:21:50.980 based sports or like martial arts or anything like that you're going to it's going to become
00:21:55.840 immediately apparent men and women are profoundly different in this dimension they're just hanging
00:22:00.320 out with all the like spindly artist types yeah very indoorsy yeah um so there's those which
00:22:08.240 ought to be obvious to everyone but there are also all sorts of really interesting ways like
00:22:11.760 women's immune systems are very different from men's as we saw with with covid men were more
00:22:17.020 likely to die from covid and it was partly to do with things like men um certain lifestyle factors
00:22:22.520 that might make a difference but it was also just to do with our immune systems and the fact that
00:22:25.980 we have to have immune systems which are um able to accommodate the presence of an of an alien
00:22:32.260 being and you know through pregnancy so it has to be different women are more prone therefore to
00:22:37.140 having autoimmune diseases um and um much more yeah more prone to things like i don't know
00:22:46.620 osteoporosis i mean a host of things where you see massive massive sex differences um there's
00:22:52.300 increasingly moves towards in in pharmaceuticals moves towards creating drugs that are actually
00:22:58.260 have different formulations for men and for women because of the recognition that actually our
00:23:03.460 systems are so profoundly different that it's not we can't just consider women to be smaller men
00:23:08.920 which is normally what you do in dosing you have to regard men and women as actually having some
00:23:14.440 really fundamental differences which mean that our drug interactions are different and yes this
00:23:19.800 is happening exactly the same time that you have this like political discussion around whether or
00:23:24.120 not women even exist as a category we're not or not just sort of gender goo did you see the clip
00:23:32.620 going around of uh it was somebody suggesting that the heartbeat at six weeks was manufactured
00:23:38.920 by the patriarchy uh i i yeah i think i saw a little bit of that american politician was that
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00:24:53.660 episode yeah i don't mean that whether or not we want it to sexual asymmetry is not going anywhere
00:24:59.520 and there has been such a reluctance among most feminists to grapple with it particularly i think
00:25:07.780 i'd say particularly now but it's a long-standing issue when it comes to the psychological differences
00:25:11.340 between men and women the differences above the neck we some feminists you know radical feminists
00:25:16.780 in particular can are completely au fait with the differences below the neck um and will recognize
00:25:22.220 the importance of things like strength differences but the but the fact that there are average
00:25:27.800 differences but very apparent ones at the population level is is more difficult if what
00:25:34.580 you're aspiring to is equality and as you as I said at the top if you if your interpretation of
00:25:38.820 equality is women being more like men the fact that there are these psychological differences
00:25:43.140 that affect our our behavior and our preferences is quite difficult to reconcile so things like
00:25:49.100 women are more agreeable than men are on average women are more neurotic than men are on average
00:25:54.140 and the fact that our sexuality differences are very obvious at the population level yes there
00:25:59.920 are exceptions but in general men have more unrestricted socio-sexuality they're more
00:26:05.060 interested in having casual sex in watching porn in buying sex men are much more likely to have
00:26:12.200 paraphilias or fetishes than women are much more likely with with with a few notable and interesting
00:26:17.020 exceptions so for instance women are more likely to be masochists and and so on but in all other
00:26:21.400 paraphilias men are wildly in the lead and i these are all things that have become much more socially
00:26:29.320 acceptable post-sexual evolution all preferences and are much more likely to be found in men than
00:26:34.740 they are in women and something like porn or prostitution or casual sex not only are men more
00:26:41.400 likely to be interested in these things but they also depend on women in order to enjoy them
00:26:46.400 right which therefore places demands on women i think that what what we're basically have seen
00:26:50.960 post-sexual revolution is if you can if you understand two bell curves for men and women
00:26:54.960 along the the sociosexuality scale you know it's not a conspiracy this isn't to do with um with
00:27:01.040 some with some exceptions this isn't generally to do with men putting sort of interpersonal
00:27:04.600 pressure on women it's got it's got more to do with culture and a new incentive structure post
00:27:09.780 pill but you what you're basically seeing is women's the bell curve sort of trying to be
00:27:15.140 dragged upwards towards the the male end and and women being encouraged to behave more like men in
00:27:19.560 every possible way um and I think in a lot of cases it's making women miserable which is why
00:27:25.160 I wrote the book it's making a lot of men miserable too the I'd say the only the only group who have
00:27:30.180 really profited from this change in the sexual culture are very high status men what about very
00:27:37.020 disagreeable intelligent women I'd say in the workplace absolutely in terms of sexuality I mean
00:27:42.940 there are women who are very high or very have very unrestricted sociosexuality I should say
00:27:47.560 properly are genuinely do enjoy casual sex genuinely do want to watch porn genuinely are
00:27:53.020 interested in all kinds of sexual adventure and experimentation those women do absolutely exist
00:27:56.880 but they are rare yeah and they will always suffer from the risks associated with casual sex like
00:28:04.280 the risk of unwanted pregnancy the fact that women being smaller and weaker means that in
00:28:09.980 any encounter between a man and a woman on their own the woman is almost always going to be much
00:28:14.440 more physically at risk of violence you know most women can most most men can kill most women with
00:28:20.040 their bare hands and but not vice versa so even a woman who genuinely really loves casual sex
00:28:26.740 genuinely is really really driven to have as many partners as possible aside from any cultural
00:28:31.360 pressure put on her she's always going to run any run a risk in any encounter and i think you have
00:28:39.280 really want to have casual sex for that risk to outweigh the benefit to you so yes there are women
00:28:44.880 who are exceptions to this there are also men who are exceptions to this and i think it's worth
00:28:48.380 emphasizing that male sexuality is quite quite is quite flexible um not in terms of sexual
00:28:54.440 orientation there's an interesting difference between the sexes that women are much more
00:28:57.840 more likely to be bisexual than men are um you know 90 i don't know 7 percent of men are straight
00:29:03.840 um but they are flexible in terms of their short-term versus long-term strategy so there
00:29:12.980 are circumstances in which it's it's um adaptive for men to want to have casual sex and to you
00:29:21.720 know in theory men can conceive a child every time they have they orgasm which is obviously not true
00:29:26.500 for women because we have much greater physical input into into reproduction um so you can see
00:29:32.640 why women would have evolved to be much more choosy about their mates and much more careful
00:29:38.300 about having sex than our men um and there is a i describe in the book as cad mode there's a you
00:29:44.760 know cad mode for men um is being driven towards having as much being as promiscuous as you
00:29:50.580 possibly can get away with you know but the other mode for men which i call dad mode is orientated
00:29:57.180 towards finding your wife having children investing in those children investing in that
00:30:02.040 unit stability you know like there is and there's a there's an element of personal preferences some
00:30:08.480 men are just more likely to be drawn towards one mode or the other but there's also an incentive
00:30:15.140 factor and a culture factor that if it's advantageous in that moment for you to do one
00:30:20.380 or the other and if your culture is telling you to do one or the other then that's going to drag
00:30:24.140 men you know in one or other direction and I think what we we see post-sexual revolution in
00:30:29.260 our sexual culture is um the incentives are all towards pad mode yeah definitely definitely i think
00:30:39.680 a lot of that's how you're raised as well and who your friends are and i think for me growing up i
00:30:44.820 went to an art school in high school so i was in a i was in a very liberal crowd i didn't even know
00:30:50.740 like what a conservative person was until like 2016 really like i didn't know any conservatives
00:30:57.620 and there was definitely a stigma around getting married settling down even dating somebody for a
00:31:07.140 long period of time it was pretty intense it was very difficult to find somebody who's interested
00:31:12.340 in being married eventually it did happen like i didn't know how some friends are like oh no i'm
00:31:18.000 i want to find somebody and settle down and i think that was because of how they were raised
00:31:21.720 is there was a big emphasis put on
00:31:24.060 that's the right way to live
00:31:25.600 and for families that had a more difficult
00:31:28.180 time or were somewhat broken
00:31:29.940 then there was less emphasis put on that
00:31:32.260 and then those are the people who still aren't
00:31:34.900 married and are still kind of
00:31:36.140 screwing around at like 32
00:31:37.500 which is also
00:31:39.460 which you probably get into, not that risky
00:31:41.940 for a man but very difficult
00:31:44.160 if they're dating a 32 year old
00:31:46.140 woman who wants to have kids
00:31:47.920 completely, completely
00:31:49.740 and
00:31:50.640 yeah because I mean it's going back to the limits of medical technology right we we do have things
00:31:58.460 like IVF and surrogacy which supposedly extends the biological clock but the failure rate of IVF
00:32:09.880 is pretty amazing particularly when it comes to age-related infertility for other causes of
00:32:15.920 infertility IVF is quite good but for age-related infertility it's honestly close to being a scam
00:32:21.800 is that when you harvest eggs late so I think that the age of the eggs does matter um quite a lot so
00:32:28.860 if you harvest them early and then do IVF later um but even then do you remember there was that
00:32:35.020 um woman who appeared on the cover of time because she was she was one of the early people to to
00:32:42.080 invest in egg freezing and she did it because she was in a very high power job i think in new york
00:32:47.060 and um it was advantageous career-wise for her to delay childbearing and so she was she was this
00:32:55.220 kind of glamorous shot on the cover of time magazine and and her promoting this this route
00:33:00.900 to liberation for women and then some years later she went to harvest she went to actually use the
00:33:05.960 eggs and discovered that almost all of them had been destroyed in the process it's just devastating
00:33:12.560 um it's it's a it it's it's by no means a guarantee and i gotta say when you see um
00:33:20.160 employers offering things like air freezing to their young female employees
00:33:25.920 this is increasingly a perk of jobs in certain in certain places particularly say silicon valley
00:33:31.560 um or often offering services services or all these other things um they are doing it within
00:33:38.820 their interests yeah they are not doing it because they you know it's a very very risky
00:33:47.880 route to go down in terms of your chances of actually having a live child at the end of the
00:33:52.640 process but it is this unfortunate fact that a crucial moment in your professional life
00:33:59.340 maps on exactly to your your fertility window which is actually quite quite short and it
00:34:06.960 has proved very difficult to to to expand it it's a funny thing that we can we can keep people alive
00:34:13.000 for a long time and until recently life expectancy just ticked ticked up and up I mean it's now it's
00:34:17.860 now falling because of things like death and despair but that's the great story of the 20th
00:34:21.540 and 21st centuries life expectancy just goes up and up but people our fertility window doesn't
00:34:27.180 and our and if anything all of our social systems are completely masked against it you know the
00:34:33.060 healthiest time really to be having children is in your early 20s and yet that's exactly when
00:34:37.540 we've got everyone is in education you don't own a home you don't you're not you're not married in
00:34:42.760 a relationship like everything is completely inappropriate for child rearing in a social sense
00:34:46.960 in a biological sense it's perfect timing but you know that's not that's not the priority
00:34:51.340 um also things that we can't we struggle to keep people healthy for a long time so yes you stay
00:34:57.200 alive for a long time but from say the age of 17 you're going to expect to have a lot of health
00:35:03.520 problems to be to be so much less physically able than you once were normally not really able to
00:35:09.200 work depending on what kind of work you do certainly not able to do manual work we've managed
00:35:13.280 to extend old age but not health it's just the limits of medical technology never cease to amaze
00:35:20.900 me so I've had a difficult time I grew up in a like my dad was traditional right my mom stayed
00:35:27.660 at home so I had a stay-at-home mom and I was always I had this kind of a difficult time
00:35:34.560 understanding what I was supposed to do because on one hand I was told getting a PhD was massively
00:35:40.480 important going to university was massively important but also you should be a stay-at-home
00:35:44.360 mom and I can remember as a teenager like adding up the years and being like okay if it's easiest
00:35:50.800 to have kids in your 20s but i'm also supposed to get a phd it wasn't even bachelor degrees like
00:35:56.880 that's for sure but like phd is what you really want it's like how do i do both and i can remember
00:36:03.280 just being like i don't know if i can like i don't know if i can do both unless like i don't know how
00:36:08.960 i can do both and then i had some health problems which delayed schooling and was like okay well now
00:36:14.240 the years are completely off i'm not going to get a phd till i'm like 31 and then like how do you
00:36:19.440 balance everything in there. And I think I had a difficult time understanding what the average
00:36:24.620 female is like because I'm extremely disagreeable. And for my entire life, I thought everybody else
00:36:31.300 was just like me. It wasn't until I was 24. I have no idea why this was because my dad being who he
00:36:38.420 is, I knew people had personality differences, but I couldn't wrap my head around what those
00:36:42.240 actually manifested like. So when I had conversations, I couldn't understand why people
00:36:47.780 acted differently in conversations than I did until I was like 24. I don't know if other people
00:36:53.120 have that problem, but it took me a long time. And it was difficult for me to figure out
00:36:58.960 what I should feel like. And so the conversation is interesting because I don't think I think like
00:37:06.320 the average female because my disagreeableness is so high. What do you think the average female
00:37:12.760 looks like what do you think they want I'm so yeah so which I do think actually is a real factor
00:37:20.520 in all this sexual culture stuff so the question I get sometimes is why are women putting up with
00:37:24.860 this why would women put up with a culture that is not geared towards their preferences
00:37:29.900 just anecdotally and also in in in media culture whatever you see so many examples of women who
00:37:38.440 will um go along with situationships so-called right or have um casual sexual relationships
00:37:46.660 without any kind of commitment without even displays of affection um which they desperately
00:37:52.180 crave and will do pornified sex acts that they don't enjoy that they don't really want to do
00:37:59.560 but they're trying to please this man whatever and the question is why would women put up with
00:38:04.220 when when in general women are the more are generally the the sex with more choices when
00:38:10.340 it comes to mates because we know from all the dating app uh data which has proved to be so
00:38:16.100 useful for sex researchers that um the hypergamy instinct in women the the the subconscious desire
00:38:25.180 to to marry up and to um be drawn towards higher status men than oneself which men don't have men
00:38:32.280 are quite happy to generally have relationships with women are the same or lower status than
00:38:35.760 themselves but women are not means that you end up with women kind of clustering towards the
00:38:40.000 higher status men i think the figures on tinder is it's like 10 of men get 60 of likes the top
00:38:46.340 10 of men that is and then the bottom 90 are getting very little whereas women are generally
00:38:51.080 get a lot of likes but they're getting likes from men that they're not interested in
00:38:53.800 and i think that what's going on is because you've lifted the monogamy restriction not legally you
00:39:02.140 polygamy is still illegal at least in the uk um that is probably the next frontier yeah poly
00:39:09.020 polyamorous are going to start clamoring to have their their relationships recognized in law but
00:39:13.540 for now it's still illegal but in practice because premarital and extramarital sex is now
00:39:19.080 socially acceptable um these high status men who in previous era would have got married
00:39:26.480 and would have removed themselves from the dating pool instead are able to have be serially
00:39:32.700 monogamous or even able to have simultaneous relationships with women who might not even
00:39:37.960 realize you know that they're part of these harems right digital harems and um i i think that's why
00:39:45.800 those women end up those those high status men are able to really really set the terms
00:39:51.020 because if they if a woman doesn't say have sex on the first date it's easy enough to find another
00:39:57.860 woman who will so you end up with a slightly artificial level of competition between women
00:40:02.560 who you know there are actually enough men to go around but there aren't enough men that they
00:40:05.900 actually want to be with to go around and so they're competing for a minority of men who
00:40:11.220 basically have I mean it's kind of open season they can demand that their own preferences be met
00:40:15.680 So what's the solution here now that we're in this predicament?
00:40:22.140 I mean, on an individual level, it is quite possible for people to just choose to be a bit more triad.
00:40:28.080 The challenge is, of course, finding a partner who wants that too.
00:40:31.880 But I'm noticing around me quite a significant turn against this stuff.
00:40:37.500 It's increasingly common in elite circles as well.
00:40:40.520 you know there's this there's this apparent turn towards catholicism among young new yorkers and
00:40:46.800 i see it among young londoners as well a greater conservatism among a sort of subsection of the
00:40:53.100 elite you can choose to to do that you know you can still get married you can still not have
00:40:58.820 premarital sex you can still choose to be a stay-at-home mom have loads of children i mean
00:41:02.840 it's more difficult because things like being a stay-at-home mom and in an economic environment
00:41:07.900 that that's really challenging it's just harder than it used to be um you won't have the social
00:41:13.020 support that you used to have if that's the route that you're choosing um you will forego status
00:41:19.980 to some extent but it's still possible so I do have advice for for readers along along those
00:41:30.380 lines you know you I think that one change that could come about quite easily is just
00:41:35.820 i think part of the sorry i was saying before but part of the reason why you see women putting up
00:41:42.420 with nonsense is because of the hypergamy effect but i think the other reason is to do with
00:41:47.040 agreeableness and agreeable people just find it really difficult to to to be assertive in those
00:41:52.300 situations and when when for instance the norm becomes having sex on a first date and indeed
00:41:58.900 the norm becomes having sex before marriage per se you know it used to be that if the social
00:42:03.120 expectation was that you you wouldn't have sex before marriage then there's no conversation
00:42:07.100 it is just assumed after a date that you know we will not be having sex that's the default
00:42:12.380 now the default is to have sex and that means that women are put in the situation sometimes
00:42:18.300 very agreeable women who are really keen to please these you know these these desirable men whatever
00:42:23.980 where they have to be defending their own sexual boundaries even if they're actually quite
00:42:27.580 reluctant and off it's often often what you see in me too cases where women are describing
00:42:33.580 situations where they're that you know they're with a man who potentially they are actually
00:42:36.940 quite romantically interested in after a date whatever aziz anzari was the famous example do
00:42:40.820 you remember that one the the actor aziz anzari who had a date with a woman um went back to his
00:42:47.740 place and she didn't want to have sex he did he didn't rape her there wasn't anything illegal
00:42:53.400 that happened she never really said no but she also wasn't was was a bit reluctant and and made
00:42:59.700 it she felt made it evident non-verbally that she was reluctant he apparently didn't think so
00:43:05.480 um and they ended up and they ended up having sex and she felt really violated felt really
00:43:10.380 distressed and she later she later wrote about this and it became a whole thing she had to express
00:43:16.300 what what happened in the terms of consent and so the the conversation that happened afterwards was
00:43:23.220 was this really consensual you know what was this sexual assault etc i think the answer to that is
00:43:29.180 no it wasn't sexual assault and on a legal level but it also wasn't good and he didn't behave well
00:43:35.260 and he didn't behave like a gentleman right is what you would have said historically he didn't
00:43:39.920 behave like a gentleman he didn't demonstrate chivalry he put pressure on a woman who what who
00:43:44.520 who he ought to have recognized was reluctant but the thing is that when when the expectation
00:43:49.600 particularly when you're talking about a fan going on a date with a celebrity which is the
00:43:53.460 circumstances there and you've gone back to his house the expectation was that they would have
00:43:57.160 sex and so it was incumbent on her to be assertive and to say no and agreeable people find that really
00:44:04.340 hard so I think that's that's very often what's going on and I think that if there's one change
00:44:08.600 that could happen quite swiftly potentially is if we had a bit of a change in in norms and
00:44:14.540 expectations and if women felt more confident in demanding certain things they I hear so often
00:44:22.880 from young women in particular this you know I'm afraid of being frigid I'm afraid of being
00:44:26.500 approved I'm afraid of of being considered low status because I don't want to do xyz if if the
00:44:33.300 status split and and different expectations were in place then I think you would see women and
00:44:41.720 therefore men behaving quite differently because women women are the gatekeepers you know most of
00:44:45.440 the time what you see now for instance at the moment is you see there's this dreadful phenomenon
00:44:50.640 on tiktok of young women showing off their bruises that they've got from having rough sex with their
00:44:55.080 boyfriends like really young women teenagers say that they've got bruises on their neck and they'll
00:44:59.240 like take tiktoks off them and this is this is considered to be really desirable i think all
00:45:04.000 women will show off by how many partners they've had i think that that's coming from a misunderstanding
00:45:09.360 of male sexuality I think that we because we're we're all kind of collectively in denial about
00:45:16.020 how profoundly different men and women are on the cellular level as we were saying but also
00:45:19.900 psychologically and I think that a lot of young women don't realize that men are much more geared
00:45:25.880 towards having emotionless sex than they are yeah and actually are much more willing to have sex
00:45:30.100 with women they really they wouldn't care if they got hit by a bus next week frankly and so things
00:45:35.040 like having you know being able to to to entice a man into bed or or to have rough sex or whatever
00:45:41.140 it's not actually much of an achievement it's pretty easy to do that particularly as a as a
00:45:46.600 young woman but because of that misunderstanding of the fact that men regard sex quite differently
00:45:51.880 from women i think that these these young women don't know that because they've not learned it
00:45:55.500 yet and because the culture completely misinforms them about reality um i think that if they did
00:46:01.160 know that i don't think they'd be putting these videos on tiktok yeah so that's a kind of modest
00:46:08.360 aim to let them know it's a good it's a good aim um i agree i think that that's kind of similar to
00:46:14.760 my misunderstanding of personality differences till i was 24 just not i just didn't i knew but
00:46:21.260 i didn't understand what that looked like i think that probably goes for differences between men and
00:46:27.680 women too i still have a hard time with that like even with my husband and i am fully educated in
00:46:33.160 the differences between men and women and i still have a hard time understanding why responses to
00:46:39.700 situations can differ between us and it's because we're you know i i mean i have that issue with
00:46:46.360 looking at other women as well but i think it's very hard for people to to understand how different
00:46:51.920 men and women can be or people can be from each other it's tricky i i found that having a baby
00:46:57.760 actually i mean i i like you i knew i knew these things academically i found that having a baby
00:47:02.380 made them really really apparent um the sense to the sense in which we are sort of slaves to our
00:47:08.020 biology and actually we don't we don't have nearly as much control over our our instincts and our
00:47:13.720 behaviors as we think because the way in which maternal and paternal instincts differ for instance
00:47:19.540 is really striking and particularly during so my son's 16 months old now you know that instinct to
00:47:26.240 check that your baby's breathing yeah which everyone does I didn't know initially that
00:47:30.500 that was a natural thing to do and so you you feel a bit crazy constantly going and checking
00:47:35.300 checking the baby's breathing but then I and I still do it occasionally but when the newborn
00:47:40.000 do it all the time I found out recently that apparently chimpanzee mothers do that
00:47:43.800 oh that's cool yeah i didn't know that that's cool yeah um and my husband doesn't do that
00:47:51.940 or a little bit maybe but it's not the same kind of desperate drive towards like i've got to check
00:47:56.520 the baby's breathing um which all of my all of my mom friends have said they have as well um
00:48:01.580 these things yeah yeah they are the thing that i noticed so uh the thing that i noticed when i had
00:48:07.880 i have a five-year-old daughter this was very strange and i thought this was on a serious
00:48:12.180 biological level is as soon as she was born i couldn't sleep i don't know i don't know what
00:48:18.140 your experience was but i used to be able to sleep through anything wherever whenever and then as
00:48:23.980 soon as she was born it was like she just breathed funny right like she's not crying she'd be like
00:48:29.640 just like this tiny little and i'd be like it'd be like an electric zap through my body and i'd
00:48:34.700 be awake I was like yeah that's crazy and she's five now and it hasn't gone away so I sleep with
00:48:42.440 like a mask and white noise and if my husband moves then I'm kind of awake and that wasn't
00:48:50.160 the case before and it happened as soon as she was born did that happen to you with noises yeah
00:48:56.140 yeah oh my gosh it's exhausting it really is um and i found as well that i um so initially we
00:49:04.340 didn't co-sleep because i was so scared of all the sid stuff and then ended up kind of gradually
00:49:09.740 letting him stay in the bed and one of the and because i and i did that partly because i read
00:49:14.140 about like the anthropology of infant sleep and the fact that infants sleeping in the same beds
00:49:20.500 as their mothers crucially not their fathers so it's not safe to have fathers sleep with the
00:49:25.880 yeah it is safe to have mothers sleep with the infant as long as there are certain like risk
00:49:31.600 factors aren't present um like premature prematurity or and mother has to not be on
00:49:36.380 sleeping drugs or drunk or anything like that but that in most circumstances it is safe for mothers
00:49:40.980 to sleep with a baby um because you are so attuned to them all the time you're not going to roll over
00:49:46.360 your baby and actually what you end up doing instinctively is forming a c-shape around yeah
00:49:51.620 where you have like your arm yeah and you do it in your sleep completely and that is apparently
00:49:57.480 the natural thing the c-shape is what they they they write about in um in infant sleep studies
00:50:02.320 like this well or like on your arm you know and then like a little oh that's so cool okay i did
00:50:09.520 that yeah um wow and uh yeah that's just that's because because your body is like completely set
00:50:15.640 on this i found as well when i in the early in the early weeks in particular i'd like i would
00:50:20.260 i would only ever dream about my son i didn't dream about anything else and i would if i closed
00:50:24.580 my eyes i could see his face like i had that level of constant attunement towards the baby
00:50:30.100 which then gradually lapses yeah yeah and that that link becomes a little bit less
00:50:34.880 you know but you know they talk about the fourth trimester yeah we we give birth to our babies too
00:50:40.400 early really and so you you have to have this intense dependency initially um yeah it's which
00:50:46.660 which has all sorts of social effects obviously as well because it just is a very uncomfortable
00:50:52.300 if if if you're a liberal individualist and you're all about people having autonomy then
00:50:58.900 motherhood is a huge problem because mothers can't be autonomous and there's this really
00:51:06.000 you know you're not really talking about two individuals when you talk about a mother and a
00:51:10.380 baby because the baby definitely can't be considered in that way because because he or
00:51:15.620 she is just completely dependent on on other people for staying alive but mothers also are so
00:51:22.080 emotionally drawn towards that but even if you've got formula even if you've got daycare even if
00:51:27.260 you've got all these things which can kind of um physically lessen the dependency that emotional
00:51:34.340 rank is insane and you know try as you might trying to persuade mothers to to break it if
00:51:42.380 that's your social project you're gonna fail that's also cruel it would have been so much
00:51:47.620 easier like I had Scarlett yeah she's five so I had her five years ago and it really decimated my
00:51:54.780 social life like and I was prepared for that but it would have been so much like there's a reason
00:52:01.440 women most women aren't doing that right especially if you're in a more liberal circle because you
00:52:07.700 have a kid and you're 25 or like 24 or 23 even 26 yeah it's like okay i was 29 and i felt really
00:52:16.440 young yeah i know 29 even yeah right like and then you're the only person especially if you're like
00:52:24.060 probably if you're educated or if you're more liberal you're the only person in your friend
00:52:29.260 group that has a kid i had responses from friends that are like oh you're ruining your life
00:52:33.440 and like that was and then the neighborhood i moved into at the time too i was looked down on
00:52:41.200 like i had a kid and they're like well what's your job it was these older women too these like
00:52:45.960 56 year old women were just like oh you're just staying at home okay yeah and i was like wow so
00:52:53.740 now my entire social circle is broken my neighborhood everyone in my neighborhood is 15
00:52:59.420 years older than me with the kids that are the same age it was just like i have the same good
00:53:04.020 luck with that and it's worth it for sure it's worth it and i think um trying to like i appreciate
00:53:11.520 what you're doing because what needs to happen i think is it needs to be made cool again because
00:53:16.840 women need it right it needs to be cool it needs to be cool to be a gentleman it needs to be cool
00:53:20.920 to be a dad like having it's so attractive to have a man say hey i want you to have babies with me
00:53:28.300 and i want to take care of you like that is so attractive i don't know when that stopped being
00:53:34.120 attractive i think it still is it is but it's just yeah this is persuading people i know i know
00:53:42.220 i completely agree and it it also ends up with a slightly unfortunate that i found
00:53:46.220 around here because we live in we live in london and we're in one of these parts of london where
00:53:50.320 yeah like at my hospital the average age for first baby was like late 30s the average age
00:53:59.780 that's crazy yeah wow and and that was including you know where i where i gave birth covered an
00:54:08.760 area with quite a high south asian immigrant population where women were having babies a lot
00:54:12.280 younger so it was it was that balanced with the with the upper middle class women who were having
00:54:16.300 them really late and um and also most most women go back to work quite quickly so you find quite
00:54:23.120 soon that if you um if you want to be stay at home or if like me at the time I was I was at home part
00:54:29.280 of the week um you have no one to hang out with I know it's everyone's at work and also you don't
00:54:34.660 have any friends who have children so they're all at work obviously and their social schedule isn't
00:54:40.320 going to fit in with you you know you want to be having like mid-morning um socializing you can't
00:54:46.040 be doing late nights and stuff it's yeah it's difficult breaking it's sad yeah you have to see
00:54:51.240 you have to seek out people who are also making your eccentric decisions yeah yeah and hopefully
00:54:57.060 that'll become more and more common it was so interesting I spent a period of time in Serbia
00:55:01.140 and if you went out to like the streets or there people would hang out at like little coffee shops
00:55:09.080 there were people my age that would have two or three kids with their friends like that would
00:55:16.720 also have two or three kids and the like men are drinking beer women are drinking coffee or having
00:55:23.260 a beer kids are like running around them and they were 28 year olds and they had kids from like
00:55:30.540 a kid on their lap and then two kids that were under five and i can remember looking at that
00:55:35.960 being like they're having a good time that looks like fun they haven't lost their lives they still
00:55:41.540 have friends they're out socializing but their kids are there i was like that just doesn't exist
00:55:48.440 here and then when i was in in russia they have restaurants set up so that you'll have a really
00:55:53.720 nice like steakhouse restaurant and at one area of the restaurant they'll hire it's generally like
00:55:59.600 kind of a grandmother type person that'll you can give your kid to for dinner yeah and they'll
00:56:05.520 entertain your kid and it's just part of the restaurant or they'll have little rooms that
00:56:09.840 are full of toys so parents can go and you can say hey you you know here's a kid for a few hours
00:56:17.140 the kids have a blast parents get a break but society is set up so that people can do that
00:56:23.740 and that institute like those types of institutions don't exist at all here
00:56:27.800 unless they're super deliberate so i'm going on a weekend soon which is put on by a by a
00:56:33.520 conservative think tank and because they're very deliberately pro-family they are providing
00:56:38.540 deliberately providing everything is family orientated you know but that's not normal
00:56:42.880 so I initially thought I can't possibly go because I don't you know and I spoke to them
00:56:46.940 and they said no no this is genuinely pro-family they've made it yeah yeah but you have to kind of
00:56:52.420 you have to go that extra mile it was also something to be fair that a lot of um
00:56:56.000 feminists did like doing conferences in second wave times doing conferences and providing
00:57:01.380 crushes because you know if if children can't participate then mothers can't participate
00:57:06.280 because they they come as a package um I think also this thing of um the fact that we don't
00:57:12.420 really see kids running around in restaurants and stuff I think it's also because that feeling
00:57:16.680 of social disapproval I think we've never had a time probably in human history where so many
00:57:22.160 adults have no have no experience of children because you can now make it a really long time
00:57:28.220 and never have held a baby because you're you're not likely to have a lot of siblings who are
00:57:33.140 having kids and not likely all of your friends are also delaying childbearing you're not really
00:57:36.780 seeing kids on about you can you can reach the age of 40 or something and you've basically never
00:57:42.200 been in charge of a child I mean I used to work as a nanny when I was younger so I'm unusual in
00:57:46.880 that sense um but I it's kind of no wonder that you have people sort of whinging about children
00:57:55.760 on airplanes and women and children in restaurants all this stuff like children are members of
00:57:59.940 society too I mean there's one thing to obviously complain about parents not being sufficiently
00:58:03.960 attentive but just yeah children hi children you know like they they they behave differently from
00:58:10.640 grown-ups and you you kind of have to learn you just have to learn that from being around them
00:58:16.360 and I think that as a society we're increasingly not familiar with what children are like which
00:58:22.240 then makes it more difficult to as a parent to be bringing children into places like restaurants
00:58:26.780 or churches think how noisy churches must have been I feel like I can almost remember
00:58:35.120 and I'm 30 I feel like when I was a kid the the weddings I went to and I went to church I didn't
00:58:41.780 go to church often I went to church a few times but I remember every time I went to one of those
00:58:45.560 events a baby would cry and then someone would get up and go outside with a baby that was just
00:58:50.780 the norm at those events and now it's not including a child-free weddings have you come
00:58:55.940 across these i've been invited to a child-free wedding but this is apparently a thing i think
00:59:02.860 i think it's the norm i think that also has to do with it is crazy i think it it has to do with
00:59:09.400 how much people are spending on weddings as well yeah so i can see how you don't yeah yeah which i
00:59:15.400 think as well you know is a consequence of um is a consequence of the pill because because
00:59:21.600 well consequence well a consequence of the death of the marriage institution which is downstream
00:59:28.420 with the pill because i think that now it is so easy to get divorced there's so much less
00:59:34.020 permanence in general attached to marriage but i think people don't feel as if it has much inherent
00:59:38.920 meaning anymore whereas you know back in the day where you really couldn't get divorced if you just
00:59:43.680 show up to if you go to gretna green and just you two and the witness you've completely transformed
00:59:48.980 your life even if the day was pretty trivial in all other senses and you didn't spend any money
00:59:53.540 on it you've completely transformed your life whereas now you haven't actually and everyone
00:59:57.440 kind of knows that so i think people try and invest meaning by spending money and making it
01:00:03.140 into a massive event and having these kind of big society weddings which were not normal um for say
01:00:09.080 our grandparents generation they wouldn't people didn't spend that that kind of big reception
01:00:13.680 dinner and everything that was what people did in the other classes that wasn't a normal
01:00:16.800 um whereas now it's expected and it ends up of course being another impediment to getting married
01:00:22.840 because you if you can't afford to have a big wedding then you might delay it and not invite
01:00:27.100 children which are actually the whole point of marriage right that's the original that's the
01:00:32.120 original purpose of marriage is to provide a basis on which to the children um whereas now
01:00:39.700 the connection is not at all obvious it's seen as a sort of means of self-fulfillment maybe uh
01:00:46.120 an accomplishment in that you found your your forever person it's not seen as a a precondition
01:00:52.600 of family formation hopefully things get better i think i think i've seen i think things are going
01:00:58.100 to get better i it felt like things were going to get worse in 2018 and i feel like things are
01:01:03.040 getting better now i think the popularity and some of these more traditional ideas
01:01:07.500 and the acceptance of them there's things have split more but i i feel like there are more people
01:01:14.720 talking about hey having a family is okay wanting to be a stay-at-home mom is okay kids are kids
01:01:21.640 are great like i think it's more popular i hope and i think men are getting more interested in
01:01:26.780 the idea as well I think or I could just be in a bubble I think you're right I think there's
01:01:31.780 something happening someone said to me um the other day that um if you if you if you had written
01:01:37.860 this book 10 years ago it would have been a flop but but this seems to be for some reason a moment
01:01:44.700 where I haven't had very much negative response actually not at all that's cool um overwhelmingly
01:01:51.760 positive and so much bigger than i thought as well i get like i get emails several times a day
01:01:57.980 from people who are saying wow this book has had such an impact on me and i i sort of feel like
01:02:03.400 i'm just saying obvious stuff but i think that we're living in a time where the obvious stuff
01:02:07.560 needs to be said agreed okay so where can people go to find your book and where can people go online
01:02:13.220 to find you so um best place to find me is on twitter so i'm at louise underscore m underscore
01:02:20.080 perry and the book is called the case against the central revolution a new guide to sex in the 21st
01:02:26.180 century and it came out uh like two weeks ago in the states and is available all over the world
01:02:33.300 and is about to be translated into a bunch of other languages but for now it's just in english
01:02:36.500 that is so cool congratulations thank you so much